The Strange Case of Wes Freeman
by prairiebuilding
Summary: In the Northwest Territory, Wes Freeman meets a strange visitor to the Marshall Sanitarium. Please readreview. I have updated the first section to include a stronger context for this story, set in the New World.
1. Section 1

The Strange Case of Wes Freeman

based on the world of HDM which belongs to PP.

Wes Freeman was a fourteen year old boy who, as his tutor liked to remind him, was not shaping up to be much of a scholar. In fact, this tutor, a rusty man by the name of Mr. Lyons, who rode his rusty bicycle up from the small college in Marshall to teach, or rather lecture, his young protégé on the history of the New World and a smattering of science. There was no theology in these lessons, for you see, as Mr. Lyons liked to point out, the great church that enveloped the Old World like a brooding angel over the void never got much a foothold in the footloose New World.

National difference, you see (so said the rusty Mr. Lyons) was much more important in the New World as the kingdoms of Spain and France vied with the republic of Denmark for control. Spain had been beaten back into the country of Mejico. The Republic of Texas broke from New France a little over a hundred years ago. That left New Denmark and New France to eye each other suspiciously and skirmish along their mutual borders.

At this point in the lesson, Wes, reprobate that he was, would be staring out of the window and his daemon, Hilrithra, would be a fat little dog dozing lazily right along with him. But the persistent rusty little Mr. Lyons would continue on with his lesson. For you see, in the later period of the history of the New World, the distinctions between New France and New Denmark had become increasingly unimportant. National distinctions grew very fuzzy as these colonies became increasingly independent and miscegenated.

Citizens of New Denmark, squeezed along the eastern seaboard of the New World for so long, became colonists who fanned out over New France (some who had had their taste of adventuring made it no further east than the Mississippi river) in search of new land in the unoccupied zone. The people of New France began to thirst for land and joined in the race as well. New settlers from England and the rest of Europe arrived as well.

These settlers, having been relatively content to stay in one place for so long, ran up against a formidable obstacle, the Legatee nation, a hybrid conglomeration of all the New World's native inhabitants who had banned together, however loosely, to repulse any further encroachment by grasping settlers. The Legatee nation formed a bulwark in the northwest and all through the Rocky Mountains. But, young man, progress must win out, first rule of history and all, and the Legatee have been pushed and pushed like mites along the floor of destiny.

Snapping back to attention after such a lecture, the young Wes Freeman would actually find himself inhabiting a little piece of the Northwest Territory. Unfortunately the rusty Mr. Lyons and his brown and tan little sparrow deamon, Nola, were there too. One day, however, Mr. Lyons came into the house where Wes lived with his mother, Sue Freeman, and informed the small family that he was leaving Marshall, the name of that little piece of the larger texture of history, and that Wes would have to find his edification elsewhere.

Sue Freeman, or rather Dr. Freeman, ran the sanitarium in Marhsall that had been endowed by a wealthy heiress whose favorite brother died of a horrible lung disease. It seemed that the dry mountain air and serene setting (now that the Legatee had been swept along) could have helped the heiress's brother. So the sanitarium was established.

It turned out, however, that the sanitarium never caught on with the terminally ill, but rather with the wealthy magnates and socialites that both fueled and feed off of the New World. She secretly worried that her son had simply run Mr. Lyons out of town. He was the third tutor who had thrown his hands up in frustration. "The boy's daemon doesn't even care to change shape," one tutor explained, indignant that his lessons that had charmed flaxen haired little girls and their polite, ever shifting daemons, failed to spark anything in this dull boy.

At first, Marshall served as a military supply depot during the vicious wars with the Legatee. Railroads brought mobile cannons and troops and supplies to the front. The plains around Marshall served as aerodocks for the zeppelins that firebombed Legattee settlements in the mountains. Soon, however, a town began to take shape in the valley around a creek and the dramatic red stone formations that jutted out from the Rocky Mountain range. Everything was dust and wood frame in Marshall. But the town could boast several burgeoning industries, two banks, a college, and, of course, a sanitarium.

There were coal and silver deposits to the south and minerals and gold up in the mountains. On a clear day, you could see the coal fires from the flats smoldering up through cracks in the ground. On any day you could find dirty miners trekking up into the mountains. Those deposits were just one of the reasons that the settlers had fought so hard for the Legatee's land.

With Mr. Lyons gone, Wes Freeman didn't see any reason to give history, science, or much of anything any of his attention. Instead, half his attention was turned to stoking the fires that fueled the enormous furnaces of the sanitarium. The other half was turned to contemplating his daemon, Hilrithra, who lay in a miserable heap next to his feet.

Hilrithra had taken the form of a lazy fat dog and refused to change. When Wes moved, he had to pick her up and carry the pathetic thing to wherever he willed himself to go. Of course doing so took exactly an act of will, an enormous exertion, like combustion or particle separation.

Wes knew that his age was approaching. He could practically feel it. His mother explained that the feeling might be due to changes in his brain. She had read in the Academy of Science and Research's journal that radical changes to the brain's structure and shape might account for part of the phenomenon of "the somastatic morphological tendency" of daemons. But all of this about morphological this and that wouldn't be so bad if Hilrithra wasn't exhibiting such, frankly, lame tendencies.

While Wes did not consciously feel it, the power of appearances certainly held sway over him. This power took him up in its grasp every time one of the sanitarium's wealthy patients addled by in furs, stroking some chestnut brown beauty of a daemon. In these moments, Wes became all too aware of the half-life he lived. His mother, being a prominent doctor, had been appointed to direct the sanitarium. It fell to her to tend to the wealthy victims of "modern life." These people looked to her to cure them of their incurable swoons, their gastric disruptions, and their hysterical melancholia. Wealth poured from these patients like the spume they coughed up into lacy hankies.

His mother cast a formidable shadow over the welfare of these magnates, socialites, and aristocrats. And yet Wes found that his place in that formidable shadow was marginal at best. He spent most of his time in the furnace room, watching wobbling fat women with grizzled tomcat and bulldog daemons pushing laundry bins and cranky Mr. Tinglar with his daemon Gelbing, a moody porcupine with twitchy quills. When he finished his daily round of chores everyday, Wes felt like there was little left to do but watch an endless supply of fuel be consumed by an endless supply of flames in the furnace room, waiting for the moment that Hilrithra would decide what he would be forever.

As Wes sat tilted back in a spindly wooden chair by the furnaces, Mr. Tinglar came hobbling towards him with a spiteful, vinegary, sour look on his face. Gelbing wobbled along beside him, her quills trembling like always. When Mr. Tinglar stopped, Gelbing nearly ran right into him. "Watch you foul little thing!" the old man said. He turned to Wes, "And you to! No laughing out of you. Ain't a funny thing at all that Gelbing is blind. She did it to spite me of course. Foul little daemon. But she can't help it and I better not catch you snickering about it."

"I wouldn't…"

"Well, don't then. In any case, got a message from your mother here. Errand or something. None of my business. Didn't look…" The torrent of reproaches and accusations trailed off as Mr. Tinglar hobbled away with his daemon wobbling after him.

Wes unfolded the stiffly folded piece of stationary, printed with his mother's name, Dr. Sue Freeman, across the top. The message was written out in blue ink, in his mother's looping handwriting, "Please come and see me." That was it. That was all that his mother had sent Mr. Tinglar to come and tell him. Wes heaved himself up from the chair, gave Hilrithra a shove with his foot, then bent down to pick her up and go on his way.

The staff offices were located on the top floor of the neatly rectangular building that formed the main part of the sanitarium. Most of the patients who came to the facility complaining of nervous agitations and stomach problems stayed in this building. Those with more rare diseases like tuberculosis stayed in a nearby building, sequestered from the others.

Wes slipped by the orderlies and patients who inhabited the bottom four floors. No one took any notice of him. People at least noticed him in the furnace room. Of course, the notice he received there usually came in the form of grunts and complaints, but sometimes grunts and complaints were better than nothing at all.

At the door to his mother's office, Wes knocked at the rattly frosted pane of glass that bore her name. "I'm with a patient, just a moment," her voice said. Wes stood against the stripe of light blue painted under the wainscoting, in a beam of light coming the windows set up high on the opposite wall. A few moments later, the door opened and an old woman wearing an enormous diamond pendant came scooting out of the office. "Thank you for stopping by Mrs. Dunn-DeBacker…"

"That's DeBacker-Dunn, dear. My late husband's great uncle was the famous Harold DeBacker. We took the name when the late Mr. Dunn inherited the DeBacker fortune."

"Of course, Mrs. DeBacker-Dunn. How careless of me. In any case, I will be sure to tell the orderly for your floor to carefully regulate the temperature of the water in your wash basin."

"Yes, yes. You see my poor Rea here gets terribly upset when I dip my hands in water that is too cold." With that, the old woman scooted away down the hall.

While they spoke, Dr. Freeman's daemon, Erigemon, a gray and red Rhesus monkey, jumped down to fawn over Hilrithra. For all of the attention that Erigemon gave Hilrithra, one might have been surprised when Dr. Freeman looked over at Wes, and said, "Good, you're here. Come inside. Quickly. I've got to tend to patients."

Inside, Wes's mother sat at her desk, Erigemon nearly propped up on his shoulder, almost invisible. "I need you to do something for me Wes." Without realizing it, Wes rolled his eyes. "Don't give me that look young man. There is a very important visitor arriving this afternoon. We must be ready for him."

"Aren't all the visitors very important." Again, there was sarcasm in his voice that Wes didn't intend to put there.

"Very clever. No, this visitor is very…unusual. There is an old stone cabin up on the ridge. I need you to go up there and spruce up a bit."

"Can't you send one of the ladies to do it?"

"No, Wes. I cannot. I'm asking you. Now please do this for me, all right? Take this key and run along."

Wes put the key in his pocket and went to the basement to get cleaning supplies. As they walked, Hilrithra said, "Why would someone want to say up on the mountain in an old stone cabin?"

"I don't know."

"We're going to have to walk all the way up there."

"I know. It won't be so bad."

"I think it will be."

In the basement, one of the cleaning ladies shoved an old rusty bucket in his arms with a few rags, a little broom, and a can of noxious smelling powder. "Water's over there," she said, pointing to an enormous faucet coming out of the wall.

The rusty bucket was heavy and it leaked. Wes's shoes were soaked and they weren't even half way there. Hilrithra, who became a mottled little bird, sat on Wes's shoulder saying, "Oh that nasty bucket. Walk faster Wes. Walk faster."

"I'm trying."

"I want to go lay back by the fire. Walk faster."


	2. Section 2

As he walked the path to the stone cabin, Wes passed the row of houses, set back in a stand of trees, where he lived with his mother and the other employees of the sanitarium. He went higher up, water splashing and Hilrithra complaining the whole way. He stopped at the top of the hill, before the trail cut over the ridge and looked out over the valley where he lived.

The first thing he saw was the enormous smokestack that shot up from the furnace room. Billows of smoke poured out from its mouth, lingered, then evaporated. In the distance were all the small buildings where people did all the small things they did. Even though Wes could not properly imagine what went on in most of these buildings, he felt that much of it was of little interest to him.

But he liked watching the smoke churn out of the smokestack. He liked the formidable way it imposed its simple geometry against the curve of the landscape. Hilrithra was pecking at his check, "Let's get going. Come on."

Wes wasn't entirely sure why his mother was having someone stay in this cabin. It seemed like it would slide down the ridge at any moment. There was one window set in the back wall that afforded a hazy view of the valley. There were no comforts to speak of here either. The bed was little more than cot. There was a roughly hewn table and a wood stove in the corner. That was it. No sink, no running water, no anbaric lights, nothing.

Hilrithra settled back into her dog form and scratched away imaginary fleas with a lazy back leg. Meanwhile, Wes swept out the floor. He shook the cleanser out over the dark planks. The floor appeared to have grown some kind of ferocious mould. Finally, Wes took a rag, sopping with water, and scrubbed away at the floor.

As he scrubbed Wes could see a dim image of the furnace room and the warm fire. These were reflections of Hilrithra's thoughts, like shadows cast in the back of his mind. They were dim impressions of his thoughts too. Laid over these images, though, were images of riches, adventures, and zeppelins. These images flitted about, jumping from subject to subject. They had same kind of manic mutability that other children's daemons did. The images in his mind never settled on any particular shape, any particular storyline. Instead, they tried to be every storyline at the same time.

When he was done wiping everything down, the cabin still looked decrepit, dark, and dirty. Wes went outside and emptied the bucket by a tree. He took one last turn inside. There was an ancient pile of soot in the wood stove. Wes wanted to leave it behind, turn away, and go back down the mountain. But a grudging feeling of responsibility came over him. He carefully opened the furnace door and used the broom to scrap out the remains of a once cheerful little blaze.

The operation was imprecise to say the least. Wes had thick black streaks on his face. The palms of his hands were absolutely filthy. Most of the soot ended up in the bucket, but some of it on the floor. Wes dutifully bent down and picked up the rest of the mess in a rag.

He picked up the rags, the broom, and the cleanser and tossed everything into the bucket. He was feeling hungry and hoped that his mother would be off duty soon so they could eat dinner. The pang of hunger, though, didn't explain the anxious feeling he felt. He stepped outside and felt a chill race over him. Hilrithra was panicked, fearful. She was the mottled bird again, whispering into his ear, "We're not alone, Wes. Look."

Wes ran his hand absently across his face, faintly conscious of the black streaks of soot there. As he made this gesture, he stared up at seven figures surrounding him sitting tall on horses that seemed to glow like gold in the afternoon light. The figures exuded majesty and power. He held a rusty bucket and smelled like cleaning solvent.

At first, Wes thought that they were looking at him. Then he realized that they had hardly noticed him at all. One by one six of the riders dismounted, leaving one rider on his horse. As the other riders moved towards him, Wes stumbled to the side, watching the scene in awe. Hilrithra, meanwhile, fluttered around his head. Wes whispered, "Settle down. You're embarrassing me."

"I'm frightened. Very frightened."

Even though he knew that a human and a daemon should think and feel as one, Wes could hardly understand why Hilrithra found this scene so scary. The riders transfixed him. He literally could not take his eyes off of them. He studied everything about them as they made slow deliberate movements for some, as yet, undisclosed purpose.

He studied the light brown tone of their skin, the broad stretch of their cheekbones, and the angular dip of their noses. He took note of their long dark hair held together by intricate pieces of glass. He marveled at their clothing, which was motley but majestic at the same time. He wondered at the way they seemed to do everything with one hand, holding the other at waist level at all times.

Most of all perhaps, Wes studied the man still sitting atop his horse. The man sat very upright, dressed in a bright red plaid shirt covered by a long gown like piece of clothing. His head was crowned with a bowler hat decorated with bits of metal and feathers. He also held his hand up, his left hand specifically, at waist level. From where he stood, Wes couldn't tell why the man held his hand like this.

The man seemed to occupy some place of honor. One of the men was holding the reigns of his horse. A young woman unrolled an ornately woven blanket from his horse to the door of the cottage. Another man was unloading small chests strapped to back of the other horses. The remaining party, men and women, were chanting and making gestures to the air, the trees, the sun, and the earth. They made intricate symbols with their fingers. Even though Wes couldn't decipher them, the signs seemed old, arcane, and powerful.

When the man finally dismounted his horse, he took two steps forward, stopped, and looked right at Wes. Wes dropped the bucket right then and there and the rusty thing rattled down the hillside. One of the young men holding the horse's reigns seemed angry. Hilrithra became a small mouse and tried to burrow inside Wes's shirt. He swatted at her as she did and finally picked her up and cupped her his hand, which he kept behind his back.

Through all of this, Wes couldn't take his eyes off of the man. The man did not look away from him either. A strange, deep, otherworldly power seemed to course through the man. While his look didn't channel any of it to Wes, it certainly communicated it. Wes trembled.

The man raised his free hand up. For a split second Wes really believed that the man would draw out a dagger and cut his throat. He certainly had heard stories of men like this doing things like that to boys like him. This man, even though Wes thought that he looked old, seemed capable of slicing him in two. His look changed so rapidly between menace and amiability that Wes didn't know where he stood.

Instead of drawing a weapon upon him, the man raised his hand higher and made a sign with his fingers. As he continued on into the stone building, Wes realized that the sign had been directed at him. From that point on, Wes diverted every thought to recollecting, to deciphering, and to understanding everything he could about this new visitor.

For her part, Hilrithra was unimpressed. As they walked down the ridge back to the furnace room, she interrupted his thoughts about the man and said, "I thought they smelled badly."

"You're making that up. I didn't smell anything."

"I think they're dangerous."

"I don't think so at all."

"Do you even know who they are?"

"Well, they were all wearing different clothes. Most of them had on shirts out of calico, that you only get from the West. They all had those glass beads in their hair. That the man on the horse had a silver armband. And did you see his shawl. I think it had teeth and flattened bullets on it. The women had shells covering them."

"But those are just details Wes."

"Well, I'm still thinking it over. Quit bothering me."

They walked on a little further, "I bet they were part of the Legatee Nation. Remember, we learned about them in school last year."

"Before we left and came here."

"Anyway, I bet that's who they are."

"I guess so," Hilrithra replied, thoroughly unimpressed with Wes's skills of deduction.

They went a little further more. Suddenly, Wes came to a full stop. The bucket, which he had retrieved, clanked against his shins. He didn't feel it though. He didn't feel it because he realized something. His realization was on par with discovering that the world disappeared when you closed the door or something like that. It was the kind of realization that could make the world appear to be topsy-turvy, inverted.

Wes Freeman realized that the man on the horse and the others with him, the very people he had just stood no more that ten feet away from, did not have daemons.


	3. Section 3

For all that Wes knew, every scientist smelled like mould and rubber. Certainly the one sitting across from him at the dinner table did. The long, rail-thin man picked at his food with a tendril like hand and regarded Will's mother with a bemused look of contempt. Wes didn't know the look conveyed contempt; he simply knew that he didn't like Dr. Bronner one bit.

While he contemplated all of the reasons that he didn't like Dr. Bronner, from his golden rimmed glasses and his stained teeth to his yellow snake daemon that seemed to creep up out of the doctor's shirt, Wes hardly realized that his mother was dressed up and smelling like rose water. Whereas the man smelled like mould and rubber, his mother usually smelled like camphour and bed linen. Of course, Wes usually brought the stench of steam and coal into the house. In their daily lives, though, Wes and his mother seemed to have drawn a truce regarding their respective stenches. This life consisted of his mother engrossed in medical journals and patient files. Camphour and bed linen wasn't just something that lingered on her clothes.

Tonight, however, the dinner table was cleared of journals and papers. There were even candles twinkling on the dinner table. Wes cranked his neck at the pressure of a striped tie his mother had forced over his neck before Dr. Bronner arrived. He met the doctor's wry look and trained his eyes back on his food. Wes found most of the conversation hopelessly abstract and uninteresting. He was aware, however, of a certain degree of miscommunication between his mother and the doctor. This was because they were from different disciplines, of course. But they both knew enough members of the Society for Advanced Research to engage in idle gossip and professional politics.

It wasn't until Marie, the servant, cleared away the dinner plates and began pouring hot coffee that Wes heard something that interested him greatly. Dr. Bronner had slid his chair back from the table and said, "Do you mind?" waving a pipe in the air.

"No...please," Wes's mother had replied. This was unusual. His mother abhorred smoking.

Nonetheless, she had given her consent to the doctor's habit and soon trails of blue smoke wafted up to the ceiling. The smell of the tobacco brought back a memory for Wes, a memory of his father. Maybe. Certainly a man. It was gone. Then the doctor said, "How is our savage getting along?"

His mother's nose wrinkled, which it always did when Wes said something impolitic, "I know that he has arrived. He had a frightfully long journey. I didn't want to bother him."

"Well, the he should be used to it. You didn't put him with the other patients I assume. Can you imagine?" Dr. Bronner griped the pipe in his teeth and he smiled at the thought.

"No he is staying up on the ridge, in an old stone shelter."

"Ah yes. That was an old vision lodge. At least my research suggests this. So, when do I get access to him?"

"The papers are still being processed by the Research Council. I hope to hear word from them tomorrow."

"You know that I submitted my papers two months ago. I would expected you to do the same.

"I understand that Dr. Bronner. But you must realize that my patients..."

"Ah yes your ailing indolent invalids. Nevertheless, I would hate to report to the deans of the college that the sanitarium is not promoting the advancement of research. The college does contribute heavily to your budget."

"Yes. I realize that the deans..."

Their conversation went on in this vein for some time, dancing around the sensitive issue of funding and research. Meanwhile, Wes mulled over what he found interesting from the conversation, the references to the stranger he saw. The mere suggestion of the stranger in his thought sent Hilrithra into a tizzy. She was a mouse then a small bird again and hopped up and down on his shoulder.

Wes was aware that Dr. Bronner's daemon, the yellow snake was training its gaze on them. The snake was wrapped around his neck and undulated in the empty space above his left shoulder causing the two rows of black stripes along its back to ripple in hideous waves. It's forked tongue shot in and out. It's coal black eyes were piercing, inquisitive, and accusatory.

Wes felt very protective of the secret he and Hilrithra shared. This secret being, of course, that the stranger had no daemon. The snake daemon seemed on the verge of reaching across the table to pluck the secret from behind his eyes. It was frightfully long. It was insistently penetrating. Wes recoiled, shot up from his seat.

As he did, the doctor spilled coffee in his lap, "Damn it!"

"Oh, doctor!" his mother said. Marie was close at hand with rags and water. The doctor's daemon had all but disappeared, having slithered down into his shirt. Wes stared at him, watching the daemon's shape rippling under the doctor's shirt. From what Wes could tell, the daemon seemed to be entwined around the doctor's body.

He heard his mother's voice, "Wes...Wes...please apologize to the doctor."

"What?" he replied abstractly.

"Young man!"

"I'm...I'm sorry." But he wasn't really. Wes knew too well that just saying it and not being stubborn about polite forms of insincerity were crucial in moments like these. He wanted to disappear and apologizing was the quickest way to do so.

The scene around the dinner table finally settled down and everyone retired to the parlour. From the windows, Wes could see the few dim lights of the valley twinkle. Everything else was a flood of darkness. His mother expected him to sit quietly until the doctor took his leave. The doctor smoked another pipe, had another cup of coffee, then resolved to make his way back to the college where, apparently, he taught the Ethnologic sciences.

"Thank you Dr. Freeman for an extremely stimulating evening. I expect to see you tomorrow and begin work of course."

"Yes, of course. I'll be sure to have everything ready for you doctor."

"I'm sure. And goodnight to you young man..."

The door closed behind the doctor and Wes listened intently as his footsteps dimmed to silence in the night.


	4. Section 4

Wes opened his eyes in the morning to the radiant outline of a face above him. He closed his eyes and waited for the light peck of a kiss his mother would give him on morning like this. He savored these tokens of affection his mother. The kiss, however, did not come. Wes opened his eyes and saw Marie standing over him. She darted over to the curtains and pulled them back.

"Time to get up. Mother's orders," Marie said. She moved efficiently around the room. The sanitarium only employed one servant to tend to all of the doctors and nurses who lived in the houses and cottages arranged around the house where Wes lived. His house, or rather his mother's house, was the largest because she was the sanitarium's director. Marie's efficiency allowed her to tend to all of the staff's needs, which could be legion when they were done putting on dutiful faces for the day.

"It's brisk out. Better slip on a sweater," she said. The sweater, as it were, was now being slipped over his head. "Fresh water there in the basin to wash up with. I left you something out on the table to eat." Marie was already moving out of the door. "Oh, and your mother left you a list of things to attend to." With that, Marie moved through the house and out of the front door attended by the scurrying feet of her small rodent daemon.

Wes, accompanied by Hilrithra, slid along the cold floor to the kitchen. The morning sun lit up a plate of toast and a lumpy fried egg. That corner of the kitchen was warm; one might say toasty. Though the toast was limp, the egg cold. Wes washed it down with dregs from the coffee pot and read over his mother's list. Mostly, the list gave a standard run down of daily chores. He had to help the groundskeeper with fall leaves, help with the laundresses with dirty diseased sheets, and distribute fresh linens to the orderlies. Wes' hand began to shake when he got the final items on the list. He was supposed to take water to the visitor and check up on him.

Not even Hilrithra's indolent whine could obscure Wes' palpable feeling of excitement, of importance over being given this task. This was a responsibility. Of course, Wes also realized this was an opportunity to delve deeper into the stranger's strange case.

In the furnace house, where the furnace fires, the large sanitizing vats, and the custodial offices were, a world existed apart from the world of nurses and orderlies and ever further apart from that of the doctors, culminating, of course with Wes's mother. For this reason, most of the washerwomen and mechanics who idled about in the furnace house put on haughty airs with Wes, ignoring him for the most part.

The only person who ever spoke to him was Mr. Tinglar who functioned as an intermediary between the sanitarium and the furnace house. He was, in truth, the supervisor of the furnace house. Power and authority must have sat very uneasily with the old man because his conversations with Wes, if they could be called that, consisted primarily of torrents of self-reproaches and self-abuse. In most cases, Mr. Tinglar's outpourings of recriminations were directed at Gelbing, his porcupine daemon. When, however, Gelbing was curled up and spiny, Wes's audience served Mr. Tinglar's purposes in a pinch.

When Wes entered into the heat and steam of the furnace house that morning, though, Mr. Tinglar was huddled up in a group with the other people of the furnace house. This struck Wes as strange because the old man usually kept himself very aloof from the others. Wes haltingly approached them. They acknowledged him with suspicious looks then the conversation stopped. One man, with a large scar on his cheek, whispered to Mr. Tinglar who gave Wes the oddest look, like a traitor or a coward might give someone before shooting them in the back.

The crowd was silent and Gelbing wobbled over to Hilrithra. Hilrithra stood defensively, leaning back on her haunches in the form of a dog. Hilrithra pawed at Gelbing then let out a high-pitched whine when a quill pricked her paw. With her submission secured, Gelbing began discoursing with Hilrithra. Wes sensed the tone of the conversation between the two daemons, but could only intuit its meaning. He realized when Gelbing wobbled back to the group and Mr. Tinglar turned his attention to the red lumpy faces assembled there that he was to be cast out. He could almost hear Mr. Tinglar through Gelbing, through Hilrithra say, "Don't you start blaming me boy! Nothing to be done about it."

Wes conceded to this thrice-removed voice and began gathering up buckets to fill with water for the hike up to the stranger's hut. While Wes kept himself at a safe distance from the chattering assembly, he managed to keep close enough to pick up pieces of the conversation. He heard things like:

"…Can't believe we've stooped to accommodating savages…"

"…cannibals…bloody cannibals…"

"…we could be murdered in our sleep…"

"…there was a strange presence in my dreams last night..."

"…I couldn't find my comb this morning…"

"…could be a spell all around us know…"

One woman wearing a floppy white cap pulled down over her ears, Mrs. Pierce by name, silenced the chatter when she said, "My youngest brother Charles fought those devils and told us the most horrendous thing in a letter."

"What horrendous thing?"

"What did he write?"

"Well, I've got it about me somewhere…" She reached down into her ample bosom and produced a thrice-folded letter. "I can't make it out. Mr. Tinglar, would you?"

Most of the washerwomen and mechanics couldn't' read. Normally they would have asked Wes to read their letters from sons and daughters or far away relatives. Mr. Tinglar cleared his throat, and raised a battered pince-nez to this nose, "The whole thing? It's a bit lengthy…"

"No, no. Just the last few lines there I think."

"And we crashed into their ranks with a roar. Shooting guns and thrusting our bayonets. I killed one of them Rosy. I've got blood on my hands now. But I've only got the blood of one, not of two. The thought. The thought chills me. I can barely write this." Mr. Tinglar removed the spectacles and returned the letter to Mrs. Pierce where it was secreted away to the bosom.

The prevailing question, of course, was what had her brother meant by "the blood of one?"

"No one knows to this day," Mrs. Pierce said with great authority, even gravitas. "We gave it to a traveling religious man to look at, a priest or a parson or something. He said it had something to do with the devils being uni-theo-logi-cal. Confounded me then and now."

"That makes no sense!" a younger man, Charles, dressed up in dirty overalls said. "They're all pagans! Worshipping stones and the like!"

And so, the group's conversation explored the intricacies of theology and ethnology in this manner as Wes left the furnace house, straining under the weight of two buckets of water.

As he made his way up to the stranger's hut, Wes could hardly concentrate both on Hilrithra's complaining and his thoughts about what he overheard in the furnace room. He couldn't entirely wrap his mind around what "the blood of one" could mean. Maybe his mother would know; she certainly had read enough books to have some idea. Then Wes was chilled by the idea that Dr. Bronner might know. He kept making pronouncements about "how they lived" and "the impossibility of reconciling our beliefs with theirs." Mostly it was gibberish to Wes. He realized though that the doctor put much faith in his knowledge of the savages.

Even though she didn't say so, Wes could sense that Hilrithra was caught up in the intrigue of it all as well. Images of dusky faced cannibals and battles, unrest of all kinds, kept popping into his head. He could hear a kind of subconscious rumble of worry emanating from Hilrithra; though, he didn't bother to ask her directly about it.

The skinny pines trees that littered the ridge cleared away as Wes approached the stone cabin. He could smell the smoke from a fire and could see the smoke that puffed from the small pipe of a chimney that had been installed there. Wes went up to the door, set down his buckets, and knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again.

No answer.

Hilrithra fluttered around to the side. The visitor was inside. Why wasn't he answering the door?

Wes knocked once more then decided to go inside. Hilrithra was a dog again, whimpering at his feet. "It's rude to go in Wes."

"But I must…"

They were already inside. They were looking at the visitor's brown wrinkled face. He was large, as tall as Wes even though he was perched on the edge of his cot. He was undressed to the shirtsleeves, a flowing flowery cotton shirt. Bright bands of gold pinched his upper arms.

The man's eyes were closed. He seemed to be meditating. He held his left hand out from his waist, perfectly level, palm up. His hand was partially closed around some kind of object.

Wes went over to the old wood stove and stoked the fire. He brought the water buckets in and made a lot of noise in the process. The man, however, did not move.

Wes stood on the opposite side of the cabin from the man and stared at him. Hilrithra was a squirrel now and was running in manic circles. Wes closed his eyes tightly, trying to block out the scramble of thoughts and images that were coursing through Hilrithra. He could hear the sound of her claws on the stone and feel the bristle of her fur. But there was something else too. Wes could feel something inside of him turn towards an abyss that was opening up within him. Not really within. No. It was between Hilrithra and himself. No. It was inside Hilrithra. The abyss was pulling him towards it. It felt as if a veil were being torn away. Wes wanted to go limp and let it pull him and yet he was afraid of it. He was afraid of it. Hilrithra wasn't.

Wes was being watched. He opened his eyes and stumbled towards the door where Hilrithra was already whimpering again as a dog. His feet hit the threshold then he stopped.

The man spoke to him in a queer voice, "You neede not goe."

Wes' hands ran over his face. "I… I… I'm sorry. I didn't know you were praying. Or whatever it was… I mean…"

"I was not praeying."

Then… Then what were you doing?" Wes was already taking small steps back towards the man.

"Concentrating."

"On what?"

"My daemon."

"But I don't…"

"You doe not see it?"

Wes's face was hot, "No."

The fingers of the man's left hand uncurled partially. Wes trained his eyes on the spot. What was he looking at? It seemed to Wes that he was looking at a hole, a void of some kind. A stain. The fingers uncurled more and light hit the dark spot. Wes realized it was some kind of object, like a small dark tortoise shell. It was impossibly dense, made out of some kind of dark material. It seemed to pull light towards it and reflect little of it back.

Hilrithra, unusually curious now, was squatting next to the man, sniffing at his hand. Wes asked, "What is it?" And yet as soon as he said it he knew. The dark, dense shell was the man's deamon!


	5. Section 5

Suddenly, Wes's life became very structured by two personages: the strange dark skinned man living on the ridge and the strange yellow skinned scientist who seemed to haunt the halls of the sanitarium. Wes went out of his way to see the former and took pains to avoid the later. In the evenings, Wes's mother seemed more harried and distracted than usual. Dr. Bronner was not invited over again for dinner. His mother said nothing more about the doctor to him directly.

As for the dark skinned man, who called himself Sitting Mountain as Wes learned, Wes became something like his personal attendant. The entire hospital staff had revolted against his mother at the suggestion that they should attend to this specimen of the enemy.

"Our boys have driven back the natives this far. I ent handing over towlies now for nothing," a grey haired orderly said to a group of the staff in the furnace house. The other men and women shook their heads while their daemons all sat listlessly grooming themselves, as if collectively trying to shrug off the slightest hint of bother.

So the daily duties of attending to the patient or guest (Wes still wasn't entirely sure what this strange visitor's status was at the sanitarium) devolved on Wes. He carried water up to the cabin. He cleaned linens. He delivered the scanty meals that his mother forced the cooks to prepare by literally standing over them in the kitchen. Wes thought that her daemon, Erigimon, would have throttled the fat little pig daemons that belonged to the cooks if such behavior was not forbidden in polite society.

Wes never saw Sitting Mountain's strange black shell shaped daemon after that first glimpse. Hilrithra, who was beginning to look positively trim from all of the activity her human had been engaged in, had nearly convinced Wes that the man's deamon was a turtle that had retreated into its shell.

"We were awfully rude to burst in like that," she explained, a prim little cat that sat curled at the foot of his bed, bathing herself.

"We were just helping though."

"Well, I would have poked my head in my shell if I were her."

"Since when have you been so proper about things?" Wes asked.

"Don't make fun Wes. I'm trying to explain to you why we shouldn't be sitting up so late worrying about that awful man's daemon.'

"But there really was something strange about it. Something almost like a mystery or a secret," Wes said. He pitched himself back in bed. Hilrithra bounced up off the bed then turned into a moth that fluttered around the anbaric light by his bed and settled on his pillow. "I'll smoosh you if you don't turn into something more substantial," Wes said to her.

"Fine then." Hilritha became a dog and bounded to the floor. When Wes clicked off the light, they both prepared themselves for a restless sleep.

The next morning, Mr. Tinglar corned Wes in the furnace house. "Someone wants to see you," he grumbled.

"Who?"

"Don't accuse me of prying into business. Nothing of my concern. And you…" he looked down at his daemon, "No need for you to be spilling out secrets. We know nothing about it. So move on."

"But I just…"

"Not saying anything more. You can't make me. I've got matters to attend to," Mr. Tinglar explained, shuffling away from Wes.

Wes set down the empty water pails he was going to fill up and went outside. He couldn't guess who wanted to see him. People hardly paid any attention to him before and positively shunned him now that he attended Sitting Mountain. He passed a few patients who were strolling the sanitarium grounds or sitting on chairs positioned by the artificial pond that had been naturally populated by ducks.

Walking around to the front of the sanitarium, Wes saw a motorized carriage sitting out front and could hear the clanking rumble of the carriage's engine. As he drew closer, he saw Dr. Bronner sitting behind the windshield, his snake deamon bobbing in and out of view distorted by the wavy glass. Wes wanted to turn and run in the opposite direction. Before he could, Dr. Bronner honked the carriage's horn causing the nurses and patients around them to turn and look. Wes knew that he couldn't get away so he walked slowly toward the doctor with Hilrithra hopping on his shoulder as a little bird.

"There you are young man," the doctor said with a yellow smile.

"Yeah," Wes replied.

The doctor's teeth resembled chunks of elephant tusk that Wes had seen on display in museums. The doctor wore a very cleanly cut woolen suit with a stiff collar, proper tie, and a pair of creamy yellow driving gloves. Most of these details were lost on Wes though. He was entranced by the undulations of the doctor's daemon whose motion seemed to be designed to lure him into the carriage.

"I know the weather is getting a bit cold for a drive. I thought the novelty would win you over though."

"I guess."

"Come now. Hop in. There's a blanket on the seat to wrap yourself up in if you are cold." As if taken over by wholly unconscious impulses, Wes climbed into the idling carriage, smelling like burnt kerosene, and plopped down on the carriage's hard leather seat. As he did the doctor's daemon slithered out of view and they motored off.

The crisp breeze that hit Wes as they drove snapped him out of his hazy state. He quickly realized that they were heading towards town. As they drove, the doctor explained to him in broken sentences that were cut up by the bumps of the rutted unpaved roads that his carriage was rather old but still dependable. Although the motor back fired loudly from time to time, Wes generally shared the doctor's view of the transport.

They crossed Marhsall's main street and the tracks of the trams that transported miners and supplies up into the mountains. They crossed Marshall creek that brought snowmelt down from the mountains. Driving down Marhsall's main thoroughfare, Wes could smell everything from beer brewing to bricks being baked. There was a steady buzz of activity in town that was not an unpleasant contrast to the isolation of the sanitarium that set higher up on the hill.

In another few minutes, the peaks of the college buildings came into view. Desolate houses dotted the landscape off to one side while the five buildings of the college hugged a dusty quadrangle planted with scrawny trees.

The doctor pulled off the road and drove up to the college's science building. He killed the carriage motor and they coasted the rest of the way.

"Well, now, what a pleasant drive,' the doctor said to Wes. The drive was novel but Wes's legs were feeling numb from the ruts in the road and the motor's vibration.

Soon, Wes was following the doctor up a long series of stone steps into the building. Once inside, they went up another staircase where they reached the anthropology wing of the building. "This way,' the doctor said, pointing Wes through a doorway.

When the heavy glass door shut behind him, Wes realized he was standing in the doctor's office. A large desk set back against the windows. Behind that was a table littered with papers, bones, and arcane looking objects. Bookcases and books seemed to crawl up the walls. The doctor again pointed Wes into a dusty leather chair that seemed to groan under Wes's weight. Hilrithra was a small mouse curled up inside Wes's shirt. Wes could feel her shivering against his skin. He tried to run his finger along her back to soothe her though she nipped his finger when he did.

The doctor sat down in his own creaking desk chair and spun around to face his desk. With his back to Wes, Wes could see the shape of the doctor's daemon squirming under his suit, as if yearning to be set free but held back in restraint by the doctor's posture and clothing. Although Wes could not see what the doctor was doing, he could hear the sharp sound of pages being turned. He also watched the doctor give his fingertips a quick swipe with his tongue then turn another page.

Then the doctor turned back to Wes, stood up, and placed a large album on Wes's lap. "Look there young man," the doctor said.

Wes followed the line of the tobacco-stained finger and looked at a photograph held in place by translucent tips on the page. A young light skinned man wearing what looked like old-fashioned clothes to Wes stood amongst a large group of dark skinned people with flat faces and sharp eyes. They all wore their hair long and wore strange combinations of animal skins, home spun fabrics, and traded cloth with riotous patterns. Some wore old-fashioned top hats. Some wore fur caps.

Wes looked up at the doctor who had his left hand buried in his pocket while he chewed the thumb of his right hand. "Well?' the doctor asked.

Wes shook his head. "I don't understand."

The doctor bent over and tapped the picture again and again, drumming on it insistently. "Look. Look at it."

As if having her curiosity piqued, Hilrithra poked her head out of Wes's shirt and looked over the picture. In her mousy squeak, Wes heard her say, "That's the visitor at the sanitarium, Wes."

"Oh, you're right. That's Sitting Mountain," he replied.

"So he's told you his name. Or at least one of his names. Well, you've really gotten on with him better than I imagined. Well, what else?' the doctor asked, becoming thoroughly impatient with Wes's dense mind.

"He's got a daemon," Hilrithra said.

"True. Very true," the doctor said.

"He has?" Wes said. He strained to look at the photograph more carefully. Sitting next to Sitting Mountain was a large animal that looked like a pole cat or a mountain lion. In fact all of the dark skinned people in the picture had daemons. Not at all like the people he had seen up on the mountain that day. He could see fierce looking hawks, soft rabbits, mangy coyotes, and so on. Even the light skinned man had a daemon. A snake daemon that seemed to throb in front of the camera.

Wes looked up again at the doctor. "Now you've got it my boy. Now you've got it."

"That's you. Only younger."

"Yes," he doctor said, smiling. As he did, his face became awash in wrinkles. "Younger. Much younger I'm afraid."

Wes still felt very confused. The doctor knew Sitting Mountain somehow. They were in a picture together. But why was the doctor showing him the picture? What did it mean?

The doctor picked up the album and returned it to his desk. He turned back to it though saying, "Of course, I forgot the most important detail." He pulled the photograph out of the album and handed it to Wes. "Go on. Turn it over."

At first Wes didn't believe what he read. If the date on the back of the photograph was correct then the photograph was nearly one hundred and fifty years old. How could that be?

"I was just out of graduate school when that photograph was taken," the doctor said. 'I was one of the first scientists to make contact with the Legatee nation. Can you imagine that? Oh, the things I learned from that trip. Mainly how much there was to learn. Can you believe that that picture was taken exactly one hundred and forty-seven years ago to the day?"

Wes couldn't believe it and yet something in the doctor's manner and voice made it nearly impossible to sustain his incredulity.


End file.
